


i want to see it all through your eyes

by nuitbleue



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Comfort/Angst, F/M, Post-Deathly Hallows, Post-Hogwarts, Post-War Trauma, Rebuilding, Slow Romance, canon-divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-22 04:05:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13755948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nuitbleue/pseuds/nuitbleue
Summary: After the battle of Hogwarts and the Second Wizarding War are over, both Hermione and Remus find themselves only slowly rebuilding some sort of life. In a void between coming to terms with their experiences in the war and starting afresh, they find with each other what they hadn't quite known they'd been seeking - comfort, hope even if some scars don't disappear. Hermione (of Age)/Remus, canon-divergence (his relationship with Tonks didn't happen in this). Rated T for slight angst and mention of torture. Oneshot so far.





	i want to see it all through your eyes

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure at all whether this is what I wanted it to be, but this idea wouldn't let me go, so I just had to get it written out. I like the original canon ending, this is just me thinking of a different way things could go. Title is a lyric from the song 'Dreaming' by singer Anica. Again, English not being my first language, there might be minor mistakes for which I apologise.  
> Thank you for your time spent reading, I'd love to read your thoughts!

I want to see it all through your eyes

 

He feels her. He can feel her through the door, through layers and layers of charms cast around the house. 

She keeps casting them, holding onto a need more so than a habit. 

Sometimes he overhears her muttering tilting little words to herself, scolding herself, in vain. They usually contain at least one mention of how she is silly, if not downright ridiculous. 

The urge to tell her to stop chiding herself rises up within him then and it takes effort to suppress it. 

He knows best. He has been this way himself and might remain it. He knows best that another’s consolation is nothing but a feather’s touch to iron walls, nothing oneself could feel much less accept.

As he steps inside the house, the charms faltering and molding and melting as though they recognise him, letting him in without the slightest trouble as they seem to have been told, he thinks once more that there are many questions he has not asked her. 

Some he might never put in words. 

He waits, always, for her to come forward and phrase things. 

Ever since they had somehow both left the battleground the school had become with beating hearts and blood-smeared faces, since they had recognised each other across the heaps of dust and stone in those beloved halls turned ruins, he had been still. 

Apart from those barely audible nothings of reassurance when motionlessly in the embrace of the other in some common room’s remains at nighttime, holding onto each other, even just onto a patch of fabric on either of their clothes, they had been quiet with each other. 

Instinct-driven as they had both been even before, they had let things fall into place in unspoken, if careful and cautious correspondence.

They had had nowhere to fall and nowhere to head and no familiar world stable enough to hold both their weight. 

While the world around them was set back into motion, people around them returned to families or professions, each of the two were spare, assigned to nothing but survival and recuperation, suspended from a newly drawn thread that ran between them like a wire, becoming brighter and warmer without either of them backing away. 

It had seemed to him then as though they had both relearned to stand on legs they hadn’t known they possessed. 

The house had been a matter of opportunity that had come to her rather than her seeking it out. 

He had rejected her idea several times when she had phrased it at last, with fervour. Fervour on both their parts and both their voices louder and rougher for the first time since.

They had avoided the matter then, for days. 

It had been nighttime again when he had first seen her scar. 

A half maintained and partially reconstructed bath room on an upper floor of the castle and the cold white light of a sickle moon and her reflection in the only mirror left intact.

Her sleeve rolled up and the flesh of her thin, pale arm, marred with that horrible thing he denied the honour of even considering a word at all.

She had looked away before their eyes could have met in that mirror.

He had asked nothing and she had said nothing.

 

‘It has a cellar or an attic too, the house I mean?’

His question had roused her attention off the bowl of cereal before her she had treated with less than disinterest. 

He found she still ate too infrequently. Something else they shared.

Her eyes had wandered across his features, meeting his gaze only slowly as if he’d disappear or change his mind and she would not want to have to look into his eyes then. 

He had noticed her breathing pick up ever so slightly as their eyes met in a long glance then.

‘I cannot chain you.’

Her voice had been brittle, yet charged with a suppressed emotion.

‘I will not. Not ever. Nowhere.’

He had accepted this – her – without a word of protest. He cast a glance around the half rebuilt hall and had felt his eyes on her. 

He knew she was weary of this. The sneaking insecurity of a semi-legitimised connection, his doubts and self-reproach.

Before she could utter any of her thoughts, he had stretched his arm out across the table between them and taken her hand into his, in a motion so swift and gentle, it had taken her a second to gather herself.

He had watched her face as she had looked down onto the table and their hands. She had intertwined her fingers with his and he had held them, cautiously.

Her fingers had been cold against the rough skin of his own, scarily so.

Had that been any of his doing, virtually leaving her out in the cold with her offer for so long?

‘Your grace’, he had said, lowly, unnecessarily low in a hall crowded as it had been then, ‘is more than all a man with a condition such as mine could wish for, Hermione.’

He had seen her swallow, biting back an emotion she wanted to master, and instantly known what she had been thinking of.

The full moon had been mere days ago and in that instant he believed to see his own wretched imagine reflected back at him in her eyes now, as he had dragged himself through the castle’s entrance at the first signs of dusk where she had come to meet him and had collapsed on the floor and into her arms hardly a minute after taking in the sight of her there, solid and still and without a word of dread or pity.

Even as his senses had faded then, and sleep had consumed him for over a day, her image had been there, a miraculous sign of acceptance, her acceptance that had filled him with something he hadn’t dared naming then and only affirmed the notion of what had been there since that day one on the battleground.

Across the table he’d seen her bite her lip then.

‘Do say what’s on your mind’, he had prompted her softly.

Her voice had been stronger then, almost challenging.

‘You’re coming with me? I mean – you’ll live with me?’

‘It seems a matter of semantics, really; as you well know, I can’t even live with myself.’

The short laughter that had escaped her at his answer was decidedly the best sound of those he had been missing since the courtyard apocalypse and even before then.

‘Honestly though?’ she had asked in a tone so low he could barely make her out.

His fingers gripped her skin a little tighter. Warmer.

‘Gladly, Hermione.’

 

They handle each other’s frailty although it is not the same. They cope with each other’s scars although they are not the same. They endure each other’s moon although it is not the same.

Then, even three years later, occasionally, there are days like this when he walks inside a silent house sealed to the rooftop with protective spells, locked once and twice and had she been able to probably a handful times more and he knows by the sight of the leathered bag she always brings to work at her post in the ministry that she is indeed there, but won’t answer when he says her name, softly first, in askance, only slightly louder then, masking the onslaught of anxiety that begins to tighten his chest then.

He knows this.

He leaves his own briefcase and his jacket somewhere in the hall, discarding both the day and the public version of himself without taking care of either.

The house is filled with the last remainders of an afternoon sun soon to set, but no exuberance of light warms him now.

He walks through the open, sunlit rooms on this floor – they haven’t decided what to do with the one upstairs.

They had done most of the work in and around the house themselves, if not for lack of financial abundance – as they’d told each other all too matter-of-factly – but for their space, both individually and with each other, this being their second shared parenthesis since the battles, though this time, it felt like something they chose and not it them.

Their friends had all been visiting once they found the time, occasions he had been restless about even days before. 

She had seen it written all across his features and she had addressed it only once, before she had bid him goodnight on a moon.

‘Stop thinking of yourself what they’d never think of you.’

Of all the reactions, none had contradicted her words or confirmed his fears and he thinks Harry’s had eased both their minds most remarkably when he had said but one sentence, with a slight shrug.

‘Don’t ask me why, but I get it, in a way. I get it.’

And he’d smiled.

Of course they had asked him why. He’d mumbled something about how they were both ‘brainy and proper and just too good for the world’ and he’d grinned by the end of it and Hermione had smacked him on the arm, not too lightly.

 

There’s still that one creak in the floorboards when he reaches the far end of the hall, where there are only their rooms left, his to the right, and hers to the left.  
They had unanimously decided on that for the time being, needing space for themselves.

She would not hold onto that forever, she’s said once and he had seen something in her eyes then, far enough away and well enough hidden to get overlooked and still too close for him not to miss it.

‘You know, sometimes’, she’d said then, softly, ‘I want to see it all through your eyes.’

He’d approached her, slowly; her breath had touched his skin then, lighter than a feather could.

‘What makes you say that?’

Her glance had reminded him that she seems to him an older soul, as wise as she is.

The brightest witch of her age.

‘Your worry is unwarranted’, she’d answered as though she had read all his most sinister thoughts of his long familiar struggle against himself and her voice was so low that he had felt her words rather than heard them.

‘No touch of yours would hurt me. You’re a much gentler being than you think yourself.’

He’d pressed his eyes shut at her words, muttering her name in protest.

She’d breathed a hint of a sigh as though she’d wanted to shake him.

‘Accept what I say, I shan’t repeat it.’

He’d reached for her hand and held it, letting his fingers ghost across her forearm then, cautiously. 

She’d shown no visible reaction to his touch, but he’d felt her pulse through the thin layer of cotton of her long-sleeved shirt. 

When he’d lifted his eyes again, her gaze had fallen deeply into his.

‘Would you tell me who did this to you?’

She had, in concise words and he’d held her in his and it was the first time the images that had relentlessly clung to her mind since that night in Malfoy Manor hadn’t brought her to tears.

When she had been close to him in that moment she’d thought she’d imagined him to be like this – to feel like this – and having it right in front of her eyes gave her a feeling of warmth she’d missed. 

It had felt like returning to a place she had had to leave too long ago. 

As she had got to know his nearness, his warmth then, it had reminded her there had been a time before all this – before the hunt, before the exile, before the end of all peace she’d known.

When she closes her eyes at night sometimes all her experiences appear condensed in a singular image – that of a road cloaked in darkness. 

It has been appearing in her mind since they’d sought refuge in that tent and it comes back to her some nights.

It used to show her just that however – a deserted road on which she was made to walk with darkness hovering at every side, in every direction nothing but hollow, impenetrable blackness. 

Sometimes she’d been dragged along there even, her feet scraping violently across the ground, drawing blood. 

Sometimes her feet paint the word carved in her skin.

Recently however, something about this image in her mind has been different; there is something else present now. 

It taken her a while to name it long after she had first reached out to see. It is a tree, she’s realised, and more than the visible image of a tree firmly rooted next to her there is a smell of the woods, earthy and sunlit on better days. 

She only seems to close her eyes completely then, wrapped in the warmth and the scent she finds along with her, soothing her and it has taken her uncharacteristically long to piece it together.

The scent is his; one day she’d painted the kitchen with him, an off-white that had been easy to get and difficult to use and they unanimously decided against using magic in that field, wanting to achieve most of the (re-)construction with their own hands.

It surfaced in odd ways every once in a while, having both grown up in Muggle-informed households.

All her senses had been blocked by that paint so that it had hit her only when they’d brushed past each other in the hall, headed to different rooms and out of a mere impulse suddenly her fingers had clung to him, clawing at his sleeve, his collar, any ever so small bit of his clothing within her reach, recognising what she has smelled in those dreams.

He’d sought her eyes then and she’s whispered his name, almost helplessly, as though asking a question she daren’t phrase. 

She’d thought she had felt him shiver under her touch.

Am I in your dreams as you are in mine?

He’d redeemed her, drawing her to him, pulling her close enough so that he breathed against her skin, in her neck. 

In that instant everything had been too narrow for her, her clothes for her body, her skin for her feelings and her ribcage for her heart.

 

His pace slows down as he reaches the threshold of his room. 

It is not as sunlit as hers at this time of day and he can practically watch the shadows creep in over his wardrobe – tidy as it is for once and his bed. The only thing neither of their rooms have is a bookshelf.

He remembers it being an idea they had come up with almost simultaneously – the spacious, wide room that used to be a living room to its former owners would no longer be quite that but – accommodating its new inhabitants – a book room instead.

They’d fused both their bookish possessions – and they’d had only eyes for each other’s books that day and not for much else and had ended up having chocolate cake at two in the morning, their very own version of anarchy.

Somehow they’d also talked about the smell of parchment, her mentioning in an offbeat tone that it was that which Amortentia turned into for her. 

He’d caught her eye.

‘They can change, can’t they, the smells I mean?’ she’d asked then, in a voice so low it was hard for him to make her out.

She wasn’t asking because she didn’t know; it was her of all people.

The smartest witch of her age.

She wasn’t asking.

And neither was he as he met her gaze then.

‘I’d say. I know mine to be different now.’

And he’d smiled one of those gentle smiles that remind her of why it had taken simply a couple of his Defence lessons for her to develop hat hitherto inexplicable crush on him which she had instantly and rigorously forbidden herself back then.

Intervals of time spent together in the following years, be it Grimmauld Place or the Burrow, hadn’t served to amend any of these feelings, dire as the occasions had been. 

She’d pushed them away or plainly ignored them in the light of all developments in their world; only a long enough gaze at him had brought it all back to her each time – that she felt for him, deeply. 

 

He takes care to linger in the space between his room and hers, just before her threshold. 

‘One day’, she’d mentioned sometime, ‘your propriety will actually drive me up a wall.’

‘How that’s telling, coming from you’, he’d answered with a smirk and promptly found himself the target of anything light enough to throw at him and he’d laughed until she couldn’t keep from doing the same.

The same orange golden afternoon sunlight comes in through the glasses of her windows and he sees the room almost bathed in it entirely.

He finds himself thinking about how beautiful she’d look in those rays of lights, how it would play with the golden strands in her hair, her skin and her eyes…

On a different day, they might have used a weather such as this for a walk or visiting Harry and Ginny whose front porch is perfectly located to catch even the flimsiest of autumn suns…

But this is one of the other days, he knows, as the protective spells, her unruly coat and bag and the silence have told him.

Sure enough he finds her there, in her room, as he sometimes does.

She is laying on her stomach on the plain wooden floor, not caring or even bothering to use a carpet for comfort. 

She lies with her legs stretched out, but her arms, as he has seen it before, tightly pressed against her chest.

He knows the way her hands cling tightly together, her fingers entwined with a grip tight enough to whiten the skin over her knuckles.

He knows her shallow breathing, her head tilted to one side, changing only every once in a while, just before her neck absolutely rebels against this position.

She gives no sign of hearing his footsteps as he enters – she doesn’t ever, on these days.

For a moment he simply stands there, watching her hardly visible breathing, her frame so tightly huddled together.

There is always the same sensation, the same clenching of his own heart, the same tightening in his throat.

And he does as he does on days like this, approaching her soundlessly and kneeling next to her, trying to meet her gaze.

It takes a while for her to look up at him, her eyes meeting his. She doesn’t alter her position.

He sees she hasn’t cried. One good sign.

Her gaze doesn’t leave his as he slowly lays down on the wooden floor next to her, adjusting so that he lies on his side with his legs stretched out mirroring hers, facing her.

Her eyes wanders over his features as trying to read what his day has been like, whether she can direct his attention off her own state to something that involved something else, anyone else.

He knows this and he does not wait and watches her do this only so long before his hand reaches out, carefully, gently stroking stray strands of her hair from her face behind her ear and just as he moves to pull his hand back towards himself she takes it into her own, holding it.

He does not hesitate, not anymore.

He gently loosens her grip on his hand and touches her shoulders and pulls her towards him instead.

His arms embrace her cautiously, giving her enough space to move back from him which she does not.

He hears a low, soft sound leave her lips – it might have been his name, he is never getting used to the way it sounds when she utter it - as she moves to close the last of the distance between them, her shoulders against his chest, burying her head in the hollow near his clavicle.

She breathes in his scent as he must inhale hers and for a moment she does believe they can see through each other and she sees him as she has seen him in her dream and feels him. His warmth. 

Days on which she is prey to relentless memories and images of the past without him by her side leave her like this, cold, numb.

She clings to the rough fabric of his shirt that smells so much like him and the warmth of his skin underneath is enough.

It’s all enough. After all she’d seen and done, things she’d never wanted to see and things she’d never wanted to do, she hasn’t known she’d need this.

Warmth. Him.

He holds her tighter now that he feels her pressing herself tighter to his body as though wanting to meld with his frame.

What she whispers now is new to him and he will find himself replaying it in his mind time and time again whenever he needs to be close to her, but cannot be.

‘My skin is cold without yours.’


End file.
